Leeds Studies in English
New Series XLVI
2015
Edited by
Alaric Hall
Reviews editor N. Kıvılcım Yavuz
Leeds Studies in English
Leeds Studies in English is an international, refereed journal based in the School of English, University of Leeds. Leeds Studies in English publishes articles on Old and Middle English literature, Old Icelandic language and literature, and the historical study of the English language. After a two-year embargo, past copies are made available, free access; they can be accessed via
Editorial Board: Catherine Batt, Chair Venetia Bridges Marta Cobb Alaric Hall, Editor Paul Hammond Oliver Pickering Helen Price Slavica Ranković N. Kıvılcım Yavuz Reviews Editor
Notes for Contributors
Contributors are requested to follow the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, 2nd edn (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008), available at
Reviews Copies of books for review should be sent to the Editor, Leeds Studies in English, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom. Contents
Kinsmen Before Christ, Part II: The Anglo-Saxon Transmission 1 P. S. Langeslag University of Göttingen
Saint as Seer: Structure and Style in Ælfric’s Life of St Cuthbert 19 Hiroshi Ogawa University of Tokyo (emeritus)
The Virgin’s Kiss: Gender, Leprosy, and Romance in the Life of Saint 38 Frideswide Gary S. Fuller Brigham Young University
The Terror of the Threshold: Liminality and the Fairies of Sir Orfeo 57 Piotr Spyra University of Łódź
Þjalar-Jóns saga: A Translation and Introduction 73 Philip Lavender University of Copenhagen
Reviews:
Geraldine Barnes, The Bookish Riddarasögur: Writing Romance in 115 Late Mediaeval Iceland. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014 [Sheryl McDonald Werronen]
Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’. 117 York: York Medieval Press, 2014 [Pelia Werth]
Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani, 119 Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Brewer, 2015 [Benjamin Pohl] REVIEWS
Geraldine Barnes, The Bookish Riddarasögur: Writing Romance in Late Mediaeval Iceland. The Viking Collection 21. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2014. 211 pp. ISBN 978-87-7674-791-6.
A new English-language monograph on the literary merits of medieval Icelandic romance is long overdue. It is not since Marianne Kalinke’s Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland (1990) that a substantial group of these texts has been discussed at length. Now, eighty years after the publication of Margaret Schlauch’s pioneering study Romance in Iceland (1934), this new book by Geraldine Barnes is a welcome addition to the still small — but growing — body of work on the genre. Promising to provide ‘readings of a group of riddarasögur which, in their debts to encyclopaedic writings and historical thought can […] be called “bookish” ’ (27–28), the monograph focuses on the romances written in medieval Iceland for Icelanders — the so-called indigenous riddarasögur, in contrast to those translated from other medieval European languages. The book’s introduction offers a brief historiography of these non-translated riddarasögur as a whole, and alerts the reader to the various types of learned material that the romance authors drew on in their composition, from the early encyclopaedic work of Isidore of Seville, to the Old Testament history written in Stjórn, to the widely disseminated Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais. Barnes’s study comprises five chapters, which discuss a group of riddarasögur, each text in its turn, from different thematic perspectives. The first of these, ‘Mapping and Measuring the World’, considers Nitida saga, Victors saga ok Blávus, and Vilhjálms saga sjóðs, and reveals ways in which these three romances draw on encyclopaedic material to demonstrate different understandings of world geography. The three medieval continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the four cardinal directions, feature as organising principles in these romances, but the way in which each manifests this is different. Barnes shows how Nitida saga takes the conventional medieval understanding of the three parts of the world and upends it into a ‘counter cosmography’ (p. 35) that makes the author’s northern homeland central, and likewise, how in Victors saga ok Blávus the three regions of the world represented by the romance’s three main characters — Victor (Europe), Blávus (Africa), and the maiden- king Fulgida (Asia) — are used in a text that ultimately comprises ‘a northern framework and a northern centre’, playing on the popular translatio studii et imperii topos (p. 45). In the chapter’s final section, the fastidious and chiefly geographical facts and measurements described throughout Vilhjálms saga sjóðs are shown to form an important part of its dual
115 Reviews framework of learned material and other riddarasögur; the text arguably assumes that its audience is ‘well positioned to appreciate [its] comic intertextuality’ (p. 52). Chapter 2, ‘The Boundaries of Knowledge’, takes Dínus saga drambláta, Kirialax saga, and Clári saga as its focus, showcasing discussion of the use and abuse of learning and knowledge in each case. Barnes shows how in Dínus saga drambláta a guide for the appropriate use of worldly knowledge and curiosity, rooted in patristic theology (p. 58), is ignored by the rival protagonists Dínus and Philotemia, who in their desire to outwit each other suffer the unfavourable consequences of what is depicted as unnatural curiosity and prideful vanity. Contrasting with this are then discussions of Kirialax saga, which takes a licit desire for knowledge and understanding of creation as the basis for the protagonist’s quest (pp. 66ff.), and Clári saga, which, while showing its characters to be learned yet curious, does not make this a feature of the romance (p. 75). Barnes reads Dínus saga drambláta and Clári saga (notable as one of the earliest riddarasögur) against each other in particular, and argues that they may ‘be considered in the context of the development of late medieval Icelandic romance as two ends of a broad compositional spectrum — from relatively straightforward exemplum in [Clári saga …], to the structural and ethical complexity’ on display in Dínus saga drambláta (p. 76). Chapter 3, ‘The March of History’, centres on Saulus saga ok Nikanors, Ectors saga, Vilhjálms saga sjóðs, and Adonias saga to show how both an awareness of and a concern for world history and written historical sources is evident in many Icelandic romances. Barnes begins by discussing how some riddarasögur use the motif of inscriptions, especially on walls, as an important means of transmitting history, as a notable feature among the romances that claim such ancient inscriptions as verifiable sources for the stories they tell. Similarly, we are shown in a brief section called ‘ekphrasis and memory’ how the legend of Troy also features prominently in many riddarasögur, as a part of this desire to acknowledge and build upon the past. In the individual discussions of the four romances featured in this chapter we see the role that Troy plays in each, as part of the ‘images of the past, as both word and picture, [which] serve as inspiration for the present’ authors and readers in medieval Iceland (p. 111). Chapter 4, ‘Defending Christendom’, looks at five romances: Jarlmanns saga ok Her- manns, Kirialax saga, Saulus saga ok Nikanors, Sigurðar saga þǫgla, and Rémundar saga keisarasonar. The chapter considers how images of crusading, the Christian knight, and conversion appear in many riddarasögur, and particular attention is paid to Rémundar saga keisarasonar, in which, Barnes shows, ‘a model of crusader knighthood is explicitly articulated’ (p. 145). We see how this longest of all riddarasögur draws on an array of learned material and other sources not only incidentally to enhance the story it tells (as some other romances seem to do), but to present a detailed picture of a Christian understanding of the world and the place of the questing crusader knight within it. Discussions of the other four texts in this chapter similarly illuminate the different ways in which each romance incorporates religious aspects into its setting, characters, and plot: we see how Jarlmanns saga ok Hermanns and Saulus saga ok Nikanors can be seen as a pair with similar themes, and how an episode in Kirialax saga draws on a ‘typical […] Christian-heathen engagement [from the genre of the] chanson de geste’ (p. 124). Chapter 5, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, focuses on six romances, three of which were not already discussed in earlier chapters: Dámusta saga, Bærings saga, and Sigrgarðs saga ok Valbrands. Barnes discusses the history of the negative understanding of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire in western European medieval romance due largely to the schism of
116 Reviews
1054, failed crusades, and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 (pp. 147–51); contrasting with this, we are then shown the largely positive understanding of the same people and places in medieval Scandinavian thought, through earlier Old Norse sagas and historical or encyclopaedic works (pp. 151–58). In the section ‘Constantinople in the riddarasögur’ Barnes draws on examples from a range of late medieval Icelandic romances to show how they ‘serve the common purpose of extolling the magnificence of Constantinople’ (p. 158). The chapter ends with separate sections dedicated to Sigrgarðs saga ok Valbrands (pp. 171–76) and Kirialax saga (pp. 176–81), which both provide particularly illuminating and celebratory depictions of the Byzantine Empire. The book ends with a brief conclusion, ‘Profiling the Audience’, which considers the afterlife of the riddarasögur through the genre’s (chiefly post-Reformation) manuscript tradition. Beginning with an overview of the types of medieval audiences that may have enjoyed these romances at the time of their composition, Barnes argues that the authors of the late medieval Icelandic romances may have been ‘a coterie of writers, familiar with each other’s work and likely to be writing as much for their peers as for their anonymous patrons’ (p. 183). Barnes then considers post-Reformation audiences, for which there is far more evidence due to the continued tradition of manuscript production. The manuscript evidence of Dínus saga drambláta with its three redactions is considered, as a largely representative case study on the audiences and enduring popularity of an Icelandic romance into the centuries after the end of the Middle Ages. The bibliography, separated into editions, translations, and dictionaries on the one hand, and secondary sources on the other, covers most of the bases, though Barnes modestly omits references to any of her own work, of which there is much relevant material. The volume unfortunately lacks an index; however, a listing of sagas in each chapter title, along with running headings indicating the saga under discussion on each page, attempt to compensate for this shortcoming. Overall, this is an important new work that can provide the basis for many future discussions of medieval Icelandic romance. The range of riddarasögur covered is impressive, although this does sometimes leave the reader wanting more in the way of discussion and analysis at the end of certain sections on individual texts. While in some cases the depth of analysis may have been sacrificed for its breadth, this leaves the book an excellent starting point for more detailed work by others; indeed, Barnes gladly acknowledges that she has here ‘barely touched the surface of a group of sagas only just beginning to come under close scrutiny as individual works of literary narrative’ (p. 191). Particularly as a study in English, The Bookish Riddarasögur: Writing Romance in Late Mediaeval Iceland opens up the genre to a wide audience, and perhaps especially to students, and experts from related fields, who may not be able to read these still largely untranslated romances for themselves.
SHERYL McDONALD UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN WERRONEN
Carolyn P. Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’. York: York Medieval Press, 2014. 184 pp. ISBN 9781903153499.
In Rethinking Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’, Carolyn Collette, Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College and a research associate at the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies, considers how to approach a poem that has
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